‘ENVIRONMENTALISM WITHOUT IDEOLOGY’ AND THE DREAMS OF WIPING OUT HUMANITY Cover Image

‘ENVIRONMENTALISM WITHOUT IDEOLOGY’ AND THE DREAMS OF WIPING OUT HUMANITY
‘ENVIRONMENTALISM WITHOUT IDEOLOGY’ AND THE DREAMS OF WIPING OUT HUMANITY

Author(s): Ondřej Beran
Subject(s): Energy and Environmental Studies, Demography and human biology
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Keywords: environmentalism; ideology; expertise; overpopulation

Summary/Abstract: My aim is to discuss the rhetoric of expertise as objective, and ideology and value-free, on the example of environmental policy. The first section introduces examples of the common rhetorical figure of expert, ideology-free environmental protection, revealing their presuppositions. The second introduces objects of comparison – the cartoonish proposals of wiping out humanity – with the aim of showing that the two groups of proposals assume an analogous rhetoric. The third section discusses some prominent features of various proposals of ‘population control’, along with the links to the current surge of so-called eco-fascism. The aim is to show that all these phenomena represent a scale of the idea of ideology-free environmentalism. The concluding section discusses the distorted understanding of expertise, ideology, and politics, central to examples given in the previous sections, as leading to deplorable ignorance or callous cynicism, and therefore, in effect, a moral failure.

  • Issue Year: 32/2021
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 439-459
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: English
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